1. Field
Example aspects of the present invention generally relate to managing optical network components, and more particularly to configuring and maintaining whitelists on a range of optical network terminals (ONTs) within a passive optical network (PON).
2. Related Art
A whitelist is a list of accepted items in a set, which in the PON environment can be used, for example, to provide predefined levels of service associated with an ONT. The list is inclusionary, confirming that the item being analyzed or processed is acceptable. In contrast to a whitelist, a blacklist is a list of items that are not acceptable.
One example of an accepted whitelist item used in a PON environment is an IP address. The IP address can be chose to correspond, for example, to a channel a customer is permitted to view. On a larger scale, a sequence of IP address entries in the whitelist can be received at the ONTs to provide a list of channels a customer has subscribed to. There can be hundreds, even thousands of entries required for each ONT. Typical requirements require 5000 entries per ONT but depending on the types of ONTs or applications, this number can go well beyond this value. Other simple or sophisticated entries can be listed in a whitelist. Supporting and maintaining whitelists on typical distributed PON architectures requires management systems and OLTs to manage provisioning, maintenance and updates of whitelists on each individual ONT in the system.